


The Girl with the Green Ribbon

by Eatgreass



Series: Statement fics [5]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, folk tales decided to pop up in my head so i wrote them down, no editing we die like archival assistants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26113468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatgreass/pseuds/Eatgreass
Summary: There was a folk tale of a girl with a green ribbon tied around her neck.
Series: Statement fics [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1814887
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	The Girl with the Green Ribbon

**Author's Note:**

> I remembered this story all of a sudden while roller skating with a friend and I just HAD to write down what I'd remembered and anyway it was spooky so, here it is!

Have you heard the story of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck? What about the story of the girl with the yellow ribbon? Or the red one? 

I don’t think the color of her ribbon really matters, to tell you the truth. No matter a Jane or a Lizzy, or even a boy with a ribbon around his neck, it’s the same. 

Here is the story. 

Once upon a time, long ago but not too long ago, there was a girl with a ribbon around her neck. It was the kind of time where cities were towns, and children ran and played without fear, and came back before supper. 

The girl met a boy. Or the boy met a girl, or the girl met another girl, it really doesn’t matter, for the meeting is what is important. The two became friends, and they grew together, and they learned each other's secrets, and shames, and they knew each other from the inside out. The girl did not tell the boy about her ribbon, although he asked many times, it was something she could not- or would not- tell him.

Boundaries are important, and the ribbon was nothing more than a mystery to the boy. A trifle. He cared about the girl, not her ribbon. 

And they grew up, and the two were married. Wedding dresses at white as snow, and a perfectly tailored suit with a green flower pinned to the lapel. It matched the girl’s eyes, and it matched her ribbon. 

Great aunts and uncles who were only at the wedding out of obligation muttered about the girl, and the way her eyes looked gaunt, and her skin was pale, and her ribbon was still choking her, but the boy didn’t care. If his wife wanted to wear a green moldering ribbon on her neck for the rest of her days, she could. 

The two grew older, and wiser, but the boy did not learn about the ribbon. He didn’t stop asking about the ribbon either. 

The two grew older, and the boy could no longer walk without assistance. 

The two grew older, and the boy laid in a bed with green sheets, coughing his final breath. The girl stroked his hair, and fed him, and told him story after story to keep him entertained, when in a moment of silence, she looked at him. 

“Do you want to know why I wear the ribbon?”

He did. 

So, she leaned down, and with shaking fingers, the boy untied her ribbon. 

He hardly knew what had happened. He didn’t  _ want  _ to know what had happened, but she was still sitting there, grinning up at him through the haze, with smooth lace encircling her throat. 

Her head was laying in his lap, smiling with eyes wide open. 

The boy didn’t scream. He had wanted to know what the ribbon was for, and now he did. Maybe this meant he could die with his last mystery answered. 

The boy was found in his bed the next morning, dead. The girl was never seen again. 

\----

I wear a rope around my arm. Mine is blue, fading, stretching, growing, fitting me, and I don’t know what will happen if I take it off. 

My mother tied it on me firmly when I was seven, and I remember the day she decided to anchor me to the world like it was yesterday, because it may well have been.

She told me I must wear it, and I did even as she died and left me alone, I wore the rope over my wrist.

I have lived with that rope around my arm, bending and watching and waiting for me for years, and now  _ I  _ am old, and alone, and the rope is frayed to breaking, just where it sits over my blood vessels. 

I could break the rope. 

I could die with my last mystery answered. 

What do you think? Is the knowledge of my existence enough to end it?

The rope is so very frayed, and I am so very old, and I think I want to know myself before I leave this world. 

Wish me luck. 


End file.
